


the trace of a man

by gravy_tape



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Character Study, Discussions of Terrorism, Gen, Inferiority complexes, Season 1 Spoilers, Troubled sibling relationships, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 14:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15220802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/pseuds/gravy_tape
Summary: The irony was not lost on him, that he’d spent nearly 20 years of his life trying to eliminate Neil from his life, to be thrown into a world where he had been eliminated from Neil’s.





	the trace of a man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nuricurry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/gifts).



It was almost like there was some cosmic force punishing him for any choice, any action, any assertion of independence. Of individuality. 

The punishment had been, for 24 years, being Neil’s brother. 

It wasn’t until their sister, Amy, was born did being “Neil’s brother” start to sit poorly on him. When Neil took to caring for their infant sister a little quicker than he had did the comparison begin. Maybe Neil had been ready be responsible a little faster than he was, when Lyle found himself a little reluctant to embrace change in their family dynamic. Maybe he found himself a little resistant to new rules, new relationships with his own parents, a change in the way the universe of his childhood home existed and functioned.

But he was 8. 

From the very first day the comparison was unfair. 

He could never explain what made people take to Neil first, but they always did. Like Neil was the center of two lives, his own _and_ his brother’s. Though maybe Lyle had put his brother there, even if he couldn't admit it. Amy had never been the problem, it wasn’t her fault. It probably wasn’t even Neil’s, though he’d spent most of his life blaming him.  
Neil hadn’t done anything other than be the constant kind of person he’d always been, and Lyle hadn’t done anything other than make an active effort to the distance between them so great that the comparisons couldn’t be made. 

The comparisons, truly, were innocent. Teachers would mention how well Neil may have done over Lyle in an assignment when returning the marks on Lyle’s own. Other students would use Neil’s behavior as leverage when asking Lyle for something, Neil had done something for them - why wouldn’t Lyle? Later in life, girls with a crush would ask him to pass Neil notes for them. The worst of it was always being mistaken for Neil, and the full stop and shift of whatever interaction had begun because they had thought he was his brother. 

That was always the most telling, and often the most painful. 

So that choice, the choice to never be mistaken for his brother, was not without consequence. It made him suspicious, it made him abrasive, it made him conspiratorial. Not because really, truly, he was any of those things, but because, more importantly, _Neil_ wasn’t those things. Maybe out of spite or festering bitterness all of his own personal falsehoods felt better than simply being “Neil’s brother”. So he clung to it. 

He couldn’t change his face, but he could the way the world saw it.

Being “Neil’s brother” made him leave home. There was no need to live away from home, he knew even then, the kind of financial burden placed on his family for him to stay in the school’s dormitories and yet he’d insisted. His family wanted him happy, and let him go. 

He was 13, he was of an age, they reasoned. 

No one suggested it might be that he simply couldn’t continue to live under the same roof as his own brother. It was a burden only shouldered by him, a festering rot known only to him. Neil, for all of the ways that he was, had always tried to be a friend. Had always tried to fix something he hadn’t fully realized was broken. It was a rivalry that only existed to Lyle. On their best days, they could sit in silence together. On their worst, Lyle simply wouldn’t come home.  
But weekends away from home turned into weeks, turned into months. Lyle only set foot in his childhood home on holidays because guilt wrenched at his insides when his mother called him after months of silence. 

But that grab at independence had consequences too, didn’t it? 

His family was killed. And he hadn’t been home in 3 months. 

He wished he could find comfort in his brother’s company after they’d passed, but he had so poisoned Neil in his own mind that entertaining reconciliation pained him more than the blood chilling agony that was the murder of his parents and sister. It was his brother who’d kept him away, he reasoned then. It was Neil who kept him from grieving. 

Their foster parents had been nice, they’d done their best to care for them with the trauma they’d endured but by that point Lyle had crafted himself into some twisted imitation of himself, one not terribly interested in healing or closure but instead one committed to disinterest and disengagement. A false mirror to place against his brother, begging the comparison. 

Despite all this, he still stayed away. Stayed in the school dormitories full time until emancipated when he was 18. 

The comparisons eventually stopped, and yet he found himself ever vigilant to prevent them.  
Lyle floated aimlessly for some time, direction in his life still subconsciously steered by the knowledge that his brother would or wouldn’t do something. Neil joined the Irish Defense Forces briefly, sending Lyle portions of his IDF paycheck, like some kind of olive branch, with notes Lyle never bothered to read. The notes eventually stopped, and then eventually the money, before Neil disappeared entirely. Their foster parents often asked if they knew what became of Neil, informing him he’d been a Ranger before effectively dropping off the map. They worried something had happened to him.

Lyle told them he didn’t know, and he didn’t care to know. 

He didn’t speak of his brother, he didn’t think of his brother. Though it was clear, his brother was alive and thought of him. Cigarettes left on his family’s headstone in Kildare were surely meant for him. 

It made it all the more difficult to believe that maybe Neil fell from grace and ended up in some halfway house, a slave to some addition or killed in conflict between the AEU and the IDF. Distantly he was disappointed in himself for assuming Neil’s reclusivity could only be tied to death or affliction, though he had been entirely unwilling to chase that particular train of thought.

He only saw him once, in all of that time. A coincidence, really. He’d gone to their graves on the anniversary. He’d always known it was only a matter of time they’d run into each other, there was no way that Neil wouldn’t also seek them out then too. 

Though it was raining, he’d made a point to avoid the cathedral, surely the Bishop would remember him and he was in no mood for conversation, instead choosing to walk through the grove of trees surrounding the grounds. The rain rarely dissuaded the Irish, so to see another mourner on the grounds was not altogether surprising. What was surprising, after a few paces, was to realize this particular mourner was at his family’s grave, enough to give him pause.  
Even from a distance he knew. There would be no one else who would come to their grave today, of all days. It struck him, even from his distance, hidden amongst the trees that despite their time apart they still managed to look identical. Lyle had altogether given up on maintaining his appearance, his hair long to his shoulders and to see the same in his brother twisted at his guts.  
That sick twisting in his chest urged him to reach out to his brother, a brief moment of weakness in a lifetime commitment to resentment that he smothered - insteading lighting a cigarette against a tree as the rain pissed down on him. 

Neil didn’t need to see him. He didn’t need to see Neil.

He didn’t see him again. 

Joining Katharon was a decision, he conceded, that perhaps Neil would have understood. Though he imagined Neil would have pushed for pacifism and diplomacy following Operation Fallen Angels and the horseshit with Celestial Being. Which may have been all the more reason he joined them. The AEU had done nothing to protect Ireland from the KPSA, and it seemed The Federation was prepared fund and facilitate those same terrorists as their own pawns elsewhere in the world. Lyle wanted to think of Katharon as a personal manifestation of his own revenge for what was taken from him regardless of apparent morality, but knew, above all other reasoning, it was the right thing to do. 

It’d been easy to lie, that his whole family died in the bombing. Though Katharon never asked. He wasn’t even, really, Lyle Dylandy to them. There was comfort in having a codename, it turned out, now permitted to distance himself even from the manufactured version of himself he’d been wearing for 24 years. He was valued for his weapons training, so far as to be entrusted with Katharon’s stolen mobile suit engagements. His ability to talk to people (to manipulate, if he was honest with himself) became a cornerstone of their more grassroots initiatives. He was valuable, something he realized he had not truly felt about himself since well, time forgotten. It was also then he realized he had truly engineered a version of his life where his brother simply did not exist. 

That version of his life was really only manifest for a year. 

Consequences always found him.

Some stranger, a young man, approached him in public and said aloud his brother’s name. A name he hadn’t said to himself in over 5 years - to tell him he was dead. That his brother had been dead for 4 years. To tell him his brother was exceptional, that his brother was a crucial member of Celestial Being - a Gundam pilot - that his brother died engaged in one of their “armed interventions”. And that they wanted him, his brother’s twin, to fill his shoes. 

More than suddenly the pieces of Neil’s disappearance coming together, more than the news that seeing his brother at this family’s grave was perhaps amongst Neil’s last moments alive, more than the news that his brother had been murdered and his body adrift forever in space, the realisation that he was - yet again - a necessary substitute for his brother sunk its cold fingers into his ego. 

He accepted because Katharon told him to, not allowing himself to entertain that it may also be penance for the guilt he regularly smothered about not approaching his brother in that rainy graveyard. He accepted it, but instantly regretted it.

The irony was not lost on him, that he’d spent nearly 20 years of his life trying to eliminate Neil from his life, to be thrown into a world where he had been eliminated from Neil’s. These people, it seemed, scarcely knew he existed. He could see it in their faces, the moment of heartbreak when they remembered he was not the man they hoped he was. 

He was 8 years old again, and someone hadn’t realised he wasn’t Neil and was doing everything in their power to end the conversation.

Frustration and disappointment gave way to spite, as it always had. If they couldn’t remember he wasn’t Neil, he was going to make sure they remembered. These people were strangers, he didn’t owe them a thing, not his friendship and certainly not the memory of his dead brother. He certainly wasn’t interested in maintaining some kind of legacy his brother, apparently, had. He never knew his brother as an adult, but they way people talked about him, the way the crew mourned him, it was easy to extrapolate. 

The girl, the tactical operator from the bridge, she’d only come to introduce herself maybe even to offer her own condolences for his own loss - clearly having no concept of the kind of relationship he’d had with his brother - when he crossed the line. It wasn’t something he felt smug about, afterward, though he’d never admit it. She’d been so easy to read, but she was young and maybe still a little shaken by her own loss. Her affection for his dead brother went beyond camaraderie and well into something resembling romantic affection, it was clear.  
If he knew anything about his brother, it would have been entirely unreciprocated. Which was exactly why he’d done what he did. A bad line and an unwelcome kiss.  
The look of horror on her face as he breezed out of the hangar hung in his mind each time he saw her, which was enough reason to avoid her when he could. He’d made an impression, he reasoned, he’d done enough.

He willfully was negligent in his duties, lax about protocol and formality because if anything, he knew Neil never would have been. This work he’d committed his (partial) life to meant nothing to him. Nothing was of consequence, nothing warranted his genuine effort or concern. Though Neil’s simulation scores continued to mock him and he’d never felt more childish in his life with how frustrated he was with a dead man. 

The only one that seemed all too aware of his game, was Tieria. Never once did that flash of grief cross his face, never once did Tieria refer to him by his codename - by his brother’s codename. Tieria Erde was very aware that Lyle was not his brother, there would never be any mistaking, or forgetting. Because Tieria hated him for it.  
The worst part of it was, Lyle was absolutely delighted by Tieria’s apparent misery. There was no damage manufacturing he’d have to do to assert his individuality, there was no kind of relationship sabotage he’d have to engineer to remind him. Tieria knew, every second spent in his presence, that he was not Neil. 

That may have been why he made an effort to seek Tieria out, at least initially, despite how very unwelcome Tieria made it clear he was. His coldness and condescension were more tolerable than the crestfallen, mournful faces of the rest of the crew. He was only human, he wanted company in his new unfamiliar circumstances, even if his company of choice did not want him. 

The sick satisfaction of twisting that metaphorical knife in Tieria’s chest lost its luster as time went on - as he began to learn exactly the kind of man his brother really was. 

Neil, he learned, had been a leader, shouldering every single one of the crew’s emotional burdens whether he was asked to or not. He had held this crew together even its its most tenuous moments. None of this was surprising to learn. Lyle had always felt as though _he_ was the selfish one, made himself into the selfish one, when Neil had always been willing to help, to go out of his way to assist, to care.  
But he’d also learned, mostly through the crew’s continued fond mourning and Tieria’s terse asides; that Neil had a temper, that he was impulsive, he’d lost his eye shortly before his death and despite his injury and stern advisement to the contrary, fought anyway. No one ever said it directly, and certainly never to Lyle but the implication that his brother knew very well that he was going to die when he did, and yet persisted, hung in the air.  
Neil, despite the emotional labor he had, apparently, been willing to do for others had not welcomed it for himself. He was evasive and secretive, despite his emotionally giving nature. He learned only upon his own arrival, having foolishly referred to his brother by his first name, that much of the crew hadn’t known Neil’s real name. 

It should have been his first clue.

Anew, for her part, hadn’t known Neil. Maybe it was why he found himself so drawn to her company at first. The crew at large had stopped looking to Lyle as though expecting his brother, having accepted Lyle’s flippant attitude regarding his position and the shift in personality that now embodied the codename Lockon Stratos, though Tieria had grown no less cold. Anew, simply, hadn't known the alternative. She was kind and welcoming almost instantly in ways the rest of the crew hadn’t been, having had to suffer through a sorrowful adjustment period despite his brother having been gone for 4 years. 

She was a microcosm of the kind of life he’d had before, back on Earth. That one year that allowed him to define himself as he chose, that one year that might have been the single most satisfactory year of his adult life. The one year without Neil. Or at least, he might have wanted to define that year in that way, but found it harder to make that claim, even privately to himself. 

The consequences always came, didn’t they?

He’d wanted to believe for so long that his issues of self worth and identity were tied to Neil, and Neil alone. That Neil had been the reason for his discontent and that his removal from his life was the key to satisfaction. But now, Neil was gone, and shouldn’t he have felt relief? 

She never asked about him, but he found himself telling her about him with her face tucked into the crook of his neck, silent as he spoke. Like he couldn’t stop himself, like he was confessing something to her. He’d been surrounded by people who’d known him, who wouldn’t stand for some differently colored portrait of his brother, he’d had no one to tell. He couldn’t tell himself the truth about Neil, but he could tell her.

He told her he’d always cared too much, even before Lyle started harboring bitterness towards his brother. But he’d always let himself believe the shared silences when they were young were Neil’s admission there was no common ground between the two of them. He’d always told himself that Neil sending him money all those years ago was a concession of defeat. That Neil knew he wasn’t wanted in his brother’s life and that it was a bribe to bring him back. It was a desperate grab by a desperate man to win his brother’s favor. 

He was struck with perfect and painful clarity that it was a sign of respect. That Neil hadn’t asked for a single thing in return. That Neil had stayed away when he knew he wasn’t wanted but had always given Lyle the opportunity to change his mind. 

He told her he never really felt like he got to grieve his family’s murder, and that he’d put that blame on Neil. It was Neil that made him live on the school campus, and it was Neil that kept him from coming home. That after they died he’d felt it was profoundly unfair that Neil got to move on with his life, while he felt obligated to stagnate for his own sense of commitment to a grudge. That he couldn’t move on, because Neil had. But rolling waves of realization about his brother up to the moment of his death became almost unbearable to endure. All of the words ever said in grief by the people who knew his brother better than Lyle thought he had suddenly painting a more complete picture.

Neil never moved on, he couldn’t. That the IDF, and then later Celestial Being, hadn’t been something Neil chose to do out of some sense to right some cosmic wrong done unto him. Not because Neil was some fundamentally better person than Lyle. A better person that had committed himself to deeds that were bigger than himself for the sake of it. Neil had not been the paragon of morality and judgement that had made it all too easy for Lyle to dismiss and belittle. It had all been, his whole life, revenge. Neil cut ties with his only family, family that was still raw and hurting with loss - to seek closure for Lyle who wouldn’t take it for himself. Neil had died because he chose to, for the sake of his own revenge. Revenge that may have given Lyle closure, should he ever learn of what he’d done. 

If he had he succeeded. 

The consequences always found him, did they? 

He never wanted to be compared to his brother. The thought of it pricking at the backs of his eyes as he stared, sightlessly, to the ceiling of his room on Ptolomy. 

He never wanted to be his brother.

He would never be his brother.

But, he would take up his cause.

**Author's Note:**

> As always this is for Nuri on this, our Summer Of Screaming 2018
> 
> When we first watched 00 I disliked Lyle on the grounds of him just _not_ being Neil. Upon a rewatch I realized that opinion was Bad and Wrong. Neil and Lyle say some truly heartbreaking things about each other that I, apparently, entirely overlooked.  
>   
>  (The 00 timelines are a gottdamb mess so I took a few liberties with canon for the sake of being Dramatic, but I promise I did my best. Unbeta'd because I like to live dangerously.)


End file.
